Hans Ertel

Hans Ertel (24 March 1904 in Berlin to 2 July 1971 in Berlin) was a German natural scientist and a pioneer in geophysics, meteorology and hydrodynamics. He began at the Prussian Meteorological Institute, where Heinrich von Ficker and Albert Defant shaped him, and continued the work of the theoretical meteorologist Felix Maria von Exner-Ewarten. His vorticity equation of 1942 is counted among the basic works of modern geophysics and astrophysics. He became professor of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Innsbruck in 1943 and professor of geophysics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1946, where he directed the Institute for Meteorology and Geophysics. In 1948 he founded the Institute for Physical Hydrography of the German Academy of Sciences, which elected him a full member in 1949 and made him vice president from 1951 to 1961. Work under his leadership covered physical hydrography, theoretical hydrodynamics, turbulence, coastal hydrodynamics, hydrographic cartography and the history of European weather, and the research on geo-ecology that began there is regarded as pioneering.